The chairs in figure 10 are of an egregious style peculiar to the town of Yealmpton in Devon which – whether for reasons of relative geographical isolation… or taste – thankfully didn’t pervade the country at large.

12 Responses to Picture This LXXVII

From the seat up, the Yealmpton continuous-arm chairs look very similar to the US continuous-arm chairs, said to have been developed in New York City as a way for chair makers there to compete with the Philadelphia bow-back chair.

Yealmpton is situated less than ten miles from Plymouth and there has always been good trade between Plymouth and New York, so it’s conceivable that Yealmpton jumped on the bandwagon, supplying chairs to North America to meet the post war demand.

It would be interesting to see additional documentation on Yealmpton trade with New York. The previously-cited article in ‘Antiques & Fine Art’ is of the opinion that
The sweeping profile of the bow is based on the French bergère chair, examples of
which were produced at this date by local cabinetmakers. This is the only eighteenth-
century Windsor pattern based on a non-English prototype…
I’ve always thought that statement a bit of a stretch; a Yealmpton-influenced design seems a more convincing explanation if it can be substantiated.

Hi Jack, I’m curious to know more about the history of the continuous-arm chairs from Yealmpton. Could you point me to any resources that support the origin of this style as ca. ~1780? The assumption that this style originated in and was never produced outside of the Northeastern U.S. seems pretty prevalent among Windsor chairmakers on this side of the pond. I suppose it’s possible that some industrious New Yorker invented the chair independently of the chairmakers in Yealmpton, but frankly that seems pretty unlikely.

Thanks, am on the verge of starting a stick chair build, and love the examples you’ve dug up, it helps to see the difference and options.
Fig 6. shows an arm rail with joinery. I’ve seen a few similar examples in researching, but haven’t seen this discussed much. I’d assumed some type of pierced bridle joint to be the most practical in my design, but wondering if there is much variety on such joinery, or any examples of 3 piece arm rails with joinery in the corners?

The use of a bridle joint for the arm of the chair in fig. 6 is unusual; the majority of two-piece arms are simply halved. Three-piece arms are normally constructed like this, though I have seen an arm with halved joints further apart and intersected with just one back stick per joint.